YouSaid · the spoken record

Barbara Oakley

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2018-04-10
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2018-04-10
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  1. “Well, I have a confession to make, and that is that I have a very bad short-term memory. And my husband will agree with that. Because you'll be like, well, did you call Fred and you have just told me to call Fred? And I really do intend to call Fred. And by the time I get to the phone, I'm like, oh, shiny. You know, I've gotten distracted and I just forget. So the great thing though is that working memory and long-term memory are kind of different, but they interact with one another. And if you have a really bad working memory, in other words, the things that you hold temporarily in mind, that can be a great thing because number one, there's good research that shows that you're more creative. And another thing is it allows you to simplify, to see simplifications that people with better working memories simply can't.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Writing is better than pretty much anybody's, but I think part of the reason his writing is so profoundly beautiful is because he's also thinking about it analytically. So I think that can very much help whatever field you're trying to do is if you try to think in more of a kind of a polymath, an all-encompassing perspective, you don't have to be just a you know, just a coder or just a chemist or just a but think of yourself more broadly and kind of incorporate some of these other approaches and I think your career and you will be happier.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “I think it has helped her professionally. I mean, even what she's doing with photography, I mean, all you have to do is read about Leonardo da Vinci and so much of art is informed by science and math. So if you have some of that with you, it can just help make you better at whatever you're trying to do. Let's take Cormac McCarthy. So I'm just kind of flabbergasted, but he's a friend. So Cormack McCarthy is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. And he's extraordinary. I mean, he's just like unbelievably good writer. How was he originally trained? He was an engineering student. And he realized that he was even, you know, he was better at writing than at engineering, which is pretty, I mean, his”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Forward, and she did really, really well. But I will say, so the other daughter, the one who really didn't want to do math, but we had her doing it anyway, but she was more natural at it. So she wanted to be an artist and she's a really good artist. And now she works as a photojournalist. But when she was in college, she took calculus. And she got a four point, which was”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Now, look, we multiply it, and or we add two more fingers. Oh, it's four in Mr. Hand. So we worked with the Kuman, and so every day should be kind of just struggling with stuff. Now her sister, on the other hand, really was pretty natural at math, but she just didn't want to do it, right? So it was always pushing a rope to get her to do it just because she didn't want to, even though what was happening was much more intuitively obvious to her than to our older daughter. So our older daughter goes to college, goes to, and now she's finishing her medical residency in Stanford. And I'm convinced she would have been one of those girls who's like, you know, I just don't have the math gene. I just couldn't do it. And instead, she went.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Shall we say she's not a natural at math? So everything was just, I mean, she was such a good sport about it. She really wanted to learn math, but everything was just like a struggle. And, you know, I'd have like a little puppet that come up with, it's Mr. Hand. And Mr. Hand has two.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “And then, so you go back and forth, you kind of, you're reading about it, you think you got it, you start working a problem. Oh, it's the practice that builds your understanding. It's this conflation. That you can look at a solution to a problem, memorize it, and have no real understanding of what it means and what you're doing. But if you kind of internalize it so that, yeah, you've got it memorized in the sense that you can regurgitate it, but you actually are pulling each step up in your mind and you understand what you're doing, then that form of active recall type memorization, it builds your understanding in a profound way. So for our daughters, I will, okay, so this is just between us and our listeners, so don't go, don't go telling my older daughter. So my older daughter.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Concept mapping. And it turns out that just this simple look at it and then look away and see what you can recall is far better in building your understanding of the material. When people were tested even several weeks later, they understood the material better and you think, well, you're just memorizing, right? But you're not because when you're putting it in your brain, you're actually understanding it. And that's how you're getting it in your brain. Now, other studies have shown, for example, that understanding does not, it isn't like some little golden key that, oh, click it goes on and then you got it. You think you have it, you're part white there, but only when you practice it, we can see those patterns further developing it.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Well, I think that there's a lot of confusion on the part of psychologists, educational psychologists in this area, and I'll illustrate this in several different ways. So there's a great study by Jeff Carpici at Purdue about where he showed what is the best way to learn if you're reading, for example, a complex paper on some scientific study or subject. The best way is you read it and then you look away and you see what you can recall of that page. So you're basically reading it as carefully as you can and then you're looking away and just trying to recall what's the key idea. And this was contrasted with underlining, rereading, or”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “I put them in a program called Kuman Mathematics. And I think some of what the schools are doing is really good, but they don't give enough practice and repetition so that students build solid neural patterns, neural chunks. So Kuma in mathematics is a terrific system developed in Japan where you gradually master different areas and you're developing these great neural patterns. There's another program that is much more recently developed called Smartik. That's SMART. SmartIk is similar to Kuman, but it's online. And so it has more of those online bells and whistles that can help gamify. What you're doing.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Different sort of perspectives on that. But if you're just trying to give someone an initial idea of how to do something and you're like, well, see, look at this. Now look at it from this way and then this way. Well, this is why the Chinese, for example, are really just laughing at us because someone from China who is 12 years old is so much further ahead of a typical US student in math that it's almost like a joke for them. It is because we're really not, we're using educational methods that are counter to what we know from neuroscience and actually can to some extent cripple students' abilities to really be successful in math and science. And I think that's why we've gone from being at the Very top to becoming, I think we're dead last in the group of 22 top nations in the OECD as far as the math abilities of our students.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “And due to the wonderful work of some of these great memory experts like Nelson Dulles, he's the four-time U.S. memory champ. Of course, Alex Mullen and his great book and so forth. I think that starting to get people to think again about how memory is important, but it still hasn't made its way into educational systems where it's still kind of a dogma that, no, you got to have them understand it. In fact, you've got to have them understand eight ways from someday, which it actually can turn out to be confusing for people. You know, if you can understand something really well in one way and you really got it, later you can build and add.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “It's why should we let the poets have all the fun? I mean, if you memorize an equation, you will also understand it more deeply. So sure, I think there's ways you can memorize where it's just sort of your rotes putting something in your mind and you're not thinking about it while you're doing it. But actually, if you memorize equations, if you actively pull out a solution from your mind enough times, you've memorized it, right? But it's really a healthy form of memorization that allows you to master the material. So I think that memorization has gotten a terrible wrap for what the last 70, 50, 70 years.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Memorization is evil No, never allow people to memorize things because you just want them to understand it. And I mean, it's gone just crazy. And the fact that I even had a student, I remember I had a student come up to me and he'd flunk this test and he's like, oh, you know, I just don't understand how I could have flunked this test. I understood it when you said it in class. And he'd heard for so many years that all he needed to do was understand something. And that was it. That's enough. That's like the golden thing. And it's not enough. It's not enough at all. Sometimes I will say to people, like you'll hear poets say, memorize the poem and you will understand it more detail.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Well, memory is integral to learning. And we all know that. But we've kind of gone off, I mean, there's this like see through history. I mean, we see this in all sorts of ways through history. Some idea will take hold and then everybody will go nuts for this idea and they go way overboard and then it goes way overboard and like Freudian psychology or psychiatry, there were some points to Freudian psychiatry, but everything got Freudian. And then you couldn't break out of that. And then it went to scanarianism. And then you couldn't publish anything that was against scanarian approaches and so forth. And similarly in education, we've gone on to this thing where”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “maybe that you're focusing great you can get even better at focusing but you may be doing it at a trade-off cost as far as that other very different network which makes wild and random and totally crazy connections which is what fuels your creativity so I can't help but wonder that I think it's important to spend at least some part of your day letting your brain just go random and that's why I think going for a walk is excellent especially if you're just kind of letting your brain go while you're doing and almost letting yourself be bored for some periods of the day is helpful because if you focus every every single second that you have available i'm just a little concerned that that It's not healthy for your creative thinking.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Not that I'm aware of. I think the one thing to be that I'm just aware of is I think there's a little bit of concerning evidence and it still has to be borne out with even further research and so forth that the more time you spend focusing as, for example, if you are focused mantra type meditation and let's say you add that in to a lot of other focused work you're doing and so forth the mantra meditation can be excellent in helping to even further build your focusing ability but there's some evidence that at the same time it's also suppressing that default mode activity. So it”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Neurogenesis, you get new neurons and they help you build new patterns. But a guy is approaching 70 and he's going stronger now than he ever was before. And I'm convinced part of it is just he really makes exercise an important part of his working day. And every other day or so, he's down on the beach going for a run. I think that people don't quite sometimes don't take the wherewithal to add exercise in, you know, because they're working as hard as they can and they don't realize that adding at least a little bit of exercise can actually help them to learn in shorter periods of time and help it kind of stick in their brain better.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “That helps dendritic spines grow. In other words, it helps make new connections. So, and you can see it. I mean, there's some great neural science papers like a nature neuroscience that show that a little dendritic spines just popping right out when they've got BDNF that they're exposed to that. And so exercise is what kind of brings this all out for you. And it is a fantastic learning, you know, it's like a medication to help you learn better. My co-instructor, Terry Sanowski, I'm convinced he did some of the earliest studies that showed the exercise is a really helpful tool in learning. And because in part because it promotes”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Well, I always think that something active is better than anything else in that what you want to do, let's say you've been writing a report. And then when you're taking your break, you don't want to go onto Twitter or Facebook and continue writing because you're using sort of the same areas of the brain and it's not giving that area a little bit of a rest. So the best all-purpose break thing is to move around to some extent, do something that's physical. And we, of course, as far as exercise itself goes, oh my gosh, that's one of the best things you can do for learning. What exercise does is it helps produce brain-derived neurotropic factor in your brain. And this is kind of like a fertilizer.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “End that almost trains your brain to be more comfortable in the focus mode and to enjoy it and then to integrate that the consolidation that's happening in the diffuse mode at the end of your little session there. And it is really a powerful technique.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “Nothing popping up on your computer screen and instead what you do is you just after turning off these distractions set a timer for 25 minutes and then focus for 25 minutes and your mind may drift off it because that's very natural but just bring it back and the whole idea is you're focusing as intently as you can for those 25 minutes and when you're done you and this is the most important part of the whole pomodoro technique you reward yourself so listen to music you like go on to facebook you know go walk around go dance around anything to comfortably distract yourself from what you've been doing and that can this whole business of focus intently and reward yourself at the end”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “So, what does the brain do? The brain says, Oh, hey, guess what? I didn't like this when I thought about this. It made me feel uncomfortable. So I'll think about something else. And so off it skitters to think about Facebook or something or anything. I mean, even cleaning your room can be more pleasant than whatever unpleasant task you're thinking about. So the best trick to overcome this as literally thousands and thousands of people from learning how to learn have told us is the Pomodoro technique. So this technique is just fantastic. It was invented by an Italian Francesco Cidillo and all you have to do is just turn off all”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “People procrastinate, how do you deal with that? Because I think a lot of times it's just easy to say great learning takes place when you use deliberate practice and so forth, but people forget about the fact that, well, you got to get to the table. You got to not procrastinate before you even, you know, start using deliberate practice. So in any case, what happens when you even just think about something you don't want to do or don't like, it activates a portion of the brain in the insular cortex that experiences pain. So it's kind of like that same feeling you get in the pity your stomach when you don't really want to do something.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “Oh, I think it relates in that it is the other main key of learning. In other words, learning about focused interfuse helps inoculate you against thinking you're stupid when you're trying to learn. But the other major, major issue in learning relates to the fact that”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “Know just as dishonest men, there can also be dishonest women who could make false accusations. So I don't know. I'm just kind of sitting there with my bowl of popcorn watching everything unfolding, going, wow, this is a first really in history that there's been such a solid kind of outpouring like this and is it actually just the beginning of the Jacobite that it's actually going to go way too far the other way. And I mean, that's possible too. Will decent people start being brought down because they can find a group of women to make accusations because all it seems to take is you have some, I don't know.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Such a good question. I have really wondered about that because There are nefarious ones among us, and they are really, really clever. And so it looks like this is shutting down some of these nefarious individuals, but they're really, really intelligent people. And so it will find other ways to manifest itself. And what I'm interested to see is how will that manifest? Because it won't manifest in a way that's as easily detectable as what's going on now. And you know what's going on now is really only the tip of the iceberg because a lot of people are too afraid to come forward. And I say this as one who is also very cognizant of the fact that there can be”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “Give some undesired proposals to the young women who were trying to come up in the news profession. And when they turn him down, appalled, he would go to the office and tell everyone there that this young lady had given him an undecent proposal and to really watch out for her. And he kept killing the careers of these young women. And if you have sort of a nefarious star who's doing that kind of thing, who's working for you, it's pretty hard to, you know, how do you deal with that? Because it can be kept hidden until it all explodes.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “Tricks that can be pulled on you. And yet also, you know, being genuinely decent enough that most people can catch the fact that that's what you're trying to do. So I just don't think it's as simple as I'm going to optimize my administrative skills because every set of personnel you ever get will have their own sets of great things and potentially their own sets of, for example, who's the latest one who is at, was it CNN? One of those like apparent superstars who turns out to be quite nefarious in what they were actually doing. I was just appalled when I was reading about one fellow and what he'd do is he would”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “They're unforced errors that any rational person would probably not do. So I don't know. I think that being a good administrator is one of the world's most difficult jobs because part of it's, it involves vision, it involves being able to inspire people. It involves being able to be a little Machiavellian yourself because you have to be able to anticipate the kinds of”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “They're going to be one step ahead of you in sort of making it look like it's all your problem. So I don't think there's a way to necessarily optimize being a manager because it is an open-ended system and an ill-posed problem in a sense. You can't get there from here, but you can In most cases incrementally that are often covered in mini-managerial sorts of courses. I mean, I see, when I see mistakes in managers, they're often like just really dumb mistakes like somebody going up for a promotion with walks on water reviews and they just say, I don't like this person, so it doesn't matter if they've got great reviews. I just simply turn it down. And it's obviously a case of deep personal antipathy and bias. But what you're going to do a lot of, I think administrative mistakes are of these kinds of form there.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “Oh, that's a great question. I think it's really hard in that if you have a mathematical system, it's all kind of quantifiable. Everything, it can be laid out and there are concrete solutions to the problems that you are faced with. With people, it's just not that way. You can be a fantastic supervisor. And if you have one of those one in 10,000 who is, you know, kind of got subclinical manifestations of borderline personality disorder or something. Oh my word. You've got some work ahead of you, even if you're the world's greatest manager because whatever you do.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “Yes, we should look at what hurts the most and focus on that. So that's something called deliberate practice, which I know you know of. But if it flows really easily and then you keep going with repeating this very easy stuff, you're not going to make very fast progress in what you're trying to learn.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “Yes, except that practice and repetition is an important part of creating those patterns. So you're going to practice differently, but you're still going to repeat if you're learning a song on the flute. And then if you're, let's say that you have a Bayes theorem problem statistics and probability, you want to work it and then you want to see if you can work it cold. And I think that's one mistake we often make in the US at least as far as doing homework. We just do it and throw it in, right? Instead of saying, oh, this is a key problem. If I've got this one, I should not memorize like, like just sort of like. An automaton, but I should get this like a song so it will, this problem's solution will unfold naturally and smoothly like a song in my mind when I look at it. That only comes through practice.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “So it's harder to see that you're simply creating physical patterns in your brain when you are learning a new idea, but you are creating a physical pattern in your brain. And so that is the underlying commonality, I think, of all learning.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “It depends at what level you look at. If you think of learning as creating a new pattern in your brain, which is exactly what new learning is, then yes, fundamentally we are, whether we're learning dance or taekwondo or differential equations, whatever you're learning, you're creating a new pattern in your brain. The thing is, of course, when you're learning different things, you have to get those patterns into your brain in different ways. So you're practicing with the mandolin, and so you have to practice it that way. You're practicing, which is hello in Russian. So you're practicing with your mouth. And math and science are a little bit more abstract.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “Got out of the army, and I'm trying to learn math and science. And the only way I knew how to learn by then was the same way I'd learned Russian, which I hadn't known at all before. When I started using those practice and repetition and back away a little bit, if you can't get it right away and then come back to it, when I started using those even the impossible happened, I was able to learn math and science. I started really low and went really slow. And all of those things worked beautifully so that, I mean, it wasn't easy. And if I'd known then, what I know now, it could have been a lot easier, but I was able to be successful.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “Instead of getting all frustrated and then come back to it and practice and repetition, those are all going to help in building things. A lot of these insights into how the brain works, I sort of figured out sort of a guess and bagosh because when I graduated from high school, I enlisted in the army in order to learn a foreign language. And I went to the Defense Language Institute, which is one of the greatest institutions in the world for learning another language. And the techniques they used are really the same great techniques that you would use to learn dance, to learn a musical instrument, to learn math and science. And when I later began, so when I was 26.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “Default mode network, the diffuse network, I often call it the diffuse mode kind of indicating the default mode network will, it will kind of take over in the background while you're not concentrating and it will work away consolidating and making sense of the material. And that's why when you come back later on, it makes sense. And in fact, you can go. you know, how could I have been so stupid? It's so obvious now. And if someone had even just told me back then, oh, it's not that you're stupid. That's not why you can't understand it. Or, you know, maybe I was stupid. But no more so than countless other children. It's just that if you can't figure it out when you first start trying, that's very normal. Give it a”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “These resting modes, there are many dozens of resting modes. I mean, probably we're just really getting a handle on it, but often the most prominent of them is called the default mode network. So you either have a mode where you're focusing on something and that can activate different parts of your brain, or you can have this mode where you're not focusing at all, you're just sort of, you know, and thoughts are coming in and out, but you're not focusing. They're just doing it sort of randomly on their own. And that learning involves going back and forth between these two different modes. And if you don't get something the first time, guess what? That's okay. If you don't get it when you're sitting there focusing the first time, back off, you know, after you focus, back off, let it go. And what will happen is that.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “It shows us lots of different things. One of the things it shows us, like one of my biggest concerns is that I think there are a lot of people like me when I was growing up. Like I said, I was no super genius or something. And so we moved when I was a little kid. I was seven years old. We moved from Texas to Massachusetts and suddenly they were way ahead of me in the multiplication tables. So I wasn't a super genius and I never really cared for math anyway. So I just said, well, heck, I don't have the math gene. I'm not good at this. And so I just gave it up. And nobody ever told me that, for example, the way your brain works is there are two fundamentally different modes. There's sort of this focus state and there's”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “Is what I've conveyed through Terry Sinowski. He's the Francis Crick professor at the Salk Institute, and he and I teach the course learning how to learn together, which has had over 2 million students now registered students. And it's also what I conveyed in the Book of Mine for Numbers. And I think that people just eat this stuff up. I mean, people are smart. They know that if you have something really solidly grounded in research and neuroscientific research and you present it and show it to them well, they know it's useful. They can see the practical use and they just love it. And so anyway, I guess that's the long story of how I got started in working on this.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “Everybody knows that you need that for music and everybody knows you need that for language. When it comes to math, it's like, let's not talk about how the neuroscience supports the fact that you also need practice and repetition for math because then you start getting into the math wars. And so looking at all this, I began to realize that there's this gaping hole in what's available for the general public about how we learn effectively in that a lot of the great and super useful information about how your brain works from neuroscience is simply not being communicated to the general public. And so I think a lot of that information”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “Math and science. And so what this means is they'll often talk about general learning and what's important in general learning as if what they're talking about is going to work for learning at advanced levels of math and science, but they've never taken it. So they don't know that it doesn't work. And so or that it's just not very useful for people. And so the more I begin researching things, the more I begin seeing how educational psychology often sort of cherry picks what they want to communicate. For example, they don't talk about things like chunking, which is incredibly important aspect of learning. And they just don't talk about it. And I think part of it is this sort of cognitive dissonance, because if you talk about chunking with relation to music, in other words, practice and repetition.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “That I didn't realize that a lot of people who are working in education do not have any sort of understanding of what's going on in neuroscience. And more than that, a lot of the top professionals who are in, for example, educational psychology, it's again that pointy discipline problem like they know a whole bunch about this little tiny area of their discipline. And often the people who are in educational psychology like that, for the most part, have no real good, solid background at highly professional levels in...”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “And so one of my students happened to ask me, you know, why did you, how did you change your brain from somebody who hated math and science when I grew up? I mean, I flunk my way through those subjects in all the way through high school. How'd you change to become someone who is now a professor of engineering? And I only started studying remedial high school algebra when I was 26. And the thing is, that was a really good question. And I said, well, Collie, how did I change? Maybe I'll write a book about this, about how I learned to change my brain and also how people in general can change their brain and learn more effectively. And I didn't really realize that that time, this is like such a long-winded answer to your question.”

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  47. “Yeah, and she'd present herself as, oh, I'm just doing it to help other people. And that was her facade that helped her to actually harm other people. And so in any case, working on all these kinds of cases, you know, you can only take researching really nasty people for so long before it starts to get to you.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “How do our brains really work? And then I began researching, well, why do good people do bad things? And that became an edited volume for Oxford University Press called Pathological Altruism. And then I did a sort of a popular science book at the same time called cold-blooded kindness, which was about a murderer who used this excuse that she was helping other people. She was a killer, actually.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “And I'm like, why am I doing this? It's just kind of nuts. Nobody's ever going to read what an engineer has to say about the discipline of psychology and why mean people do what they do. But to my, you know, after six years of working on this thing, and I really did my homework and exposed a lot of flaws in the field of psychology And prominent psychologists such as Stephen Pinker gave me a great blurb, really liked the book, and it was a hit, a critical hit with prominent psychologists, psychiatrists, and so forth. And what that gave me though was it gave me a very good understanding of what not the best but pretty darn good about what's going on in neuroscience.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “And it turns out that it didn't have a lot to say about mean people, not at that time. But psychology had all this stuff that had no scientific foundation whatsoever. So there was a great body of literature on malignant narcissism. But no connection to fMRI studies or anything like that. So anyway, I am really getting back to answering your question, but I spent six years kind of squirreled away while I was trying to get tenure also working on this book that became called, and this is a totally tongue-in-cheek title. It was Evil Genes, Wyronfell, Hitler Rose, and Ronfeld, and my sister stole my mother's boyfriend.”

    2018-04-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT